From Doctor Who Magazine #114-116
A Review by Finn Clark 14/11/04
An overlooked gem. Admittedly Time Bomb (DWM 114-116) is somewhat dry... it doesn't really have any incidental characters, since our heroes interact with no-one but robots and overgrown lizards, and those only fleetingly. Instead it's about cosmic irony rather than human drama. This is the story of a five-dimensional investigation, as our time-travelling heroes the Doctor and Frobisher chase down a disaster through space, time and timelines. (Peri is taking a break watching baseball; there's a glimpse of someone on the final page who might be her, but basically she ain't in this story.)
There can hardly be a DWM comic strip more brain-bending than this, yet there's nothing here but honestly presented hard SF. It's certainly not wild and wacky, or anything like that. It's about the Hedrons, their accidental racial suicide and the fall of two civilisations (if you count the lizard people in episode two). Visually it's damn spooky, with poison clouds, impact craters, a ship full of religious killers-to-be and corpses all over the place. This isn't the John Ridgway of Steve Parkhouse's Voyager saga; it's the John Ridgway of those first issues of Hellblazer. (Coincidentally it's also the same writer: Jamie Delano.) Among its other achievements is a dribble-inducingly luscious view of primeval Earth, by the way. Time-Flight this ain't.
The pace of this story is astonishing. We skip between 1986 AD, 2850 AD, 150 million BC and more, taking in multiple planets and timezones, without ever feeling rushed or overwhelmed. There's a two-page sequence in episode two (New York, but not as we know it) that these days would be stretched out to last a whole episode, if not two.
Americans might be happy to see baseball for once being acknowledged in Doctor Who, though apparently Illegal Alien devotes a page to the Doctor's thoughts on his favourite players and also tells us that he was at the 1926 World Series. On the last page, the TARDIS even lands on the diamond! Mind you, Frobisher's baseball knowledge may not be as good as he thinks... he wants to see a "Dodgers-Redskins" game, but I'm informed that the Redskins are American football, not baseball. [NOTE: my knowledge of baseball is pretty damned shaky and so this paragraph may have been utter bollocks.]
As predicted, Frobisher's monomorphia is gone again. That didn't last long. Mind you, it's back shortly afterwards when convenient for the plot... Well, Frobisher's cool so I can forgive all that. (But dammit, I wish the monomorphia had been given a more solid basis than "it's been coming on for some time".)
Overall, this story is the exact opposite of a barrel of laughs. Read it if you're looking for the grimmest kind of fatalism and planetary annihilation as a kind of cosmic joke. This story is as bleak as hell. I think it's great!